“From when she was a baby, Tom has taught the girl to respect, but not fear, the forces of nature- the lightning that might strike the light tower on Janus, the oceans that batter the island.”

“Scars are just another kind of memory.”

“Your family's never in your past. You carry it around with you everywhere.”

“We can't rightly ever talk about the future, if you think about it. We can only talk about what we imagine or wish for. It's not the same thing.”

“If the war had taught her anything, it was to take nothing for granted: that it wasnt safe to put off what mattered. Life could snatch away the things you treasured, and there was no getting them b...”

“Life, thought Septimus, ... you could never trust the bastard. What it gives with one hand, it takes away with the other.”

“If there were a sympathy in choice,War, death, or sickness, did lay siege to it,Making it momentary as a sound,Swift as a shadow, short as any dream,Brief as the lightning in the collied nightThat,...”

“Do you think that God would separate me from my husband if I killed myself? I feel as though I am going out of my mind at times. Wouldnt God understand that I just want to be with him?”

“I went back to those graves not long afterward and found as I stood there that sadness was a very heavy thing. My body weighed twice what it had only a moment earlier, as if those graves were pulli...”

“I know what it is to live entirely for and with what I love best on earth. I hold myself supremely blest -- blest beyond what language can express because I am my husband's life as fully as he is m...”

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”

“When a woman thinks her husband is a fool, her marriage is over. They may part in one year or ten; they may live together until death. But if she thinks he is a fool, she will not love him again.”

“There are many things that make a man irritable when he arrives home from work in the evening and a sensible wife will usually notice the storm-signals and will leave him alone until he simmers down.”

“Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.”

“A lot of men wouldn't like being called a romantic. It's not macho enough.'Quite often men are fools.”